Purple Heart soldiers: In the company of my brothers

My father was a tank commander in World War II. He died many years ago, and I've got a faded, yellow news clipping that says he was wounded in battle and received a Purple Heart. I too have a Purple Heart from when I was a young Marine in Vietnam, but I have always felt undeserving. I stuffed mine in my desk drawer. I used to pull it out and think of Bobby crossing the rice paddies, shot up so many times; or Gurny lying on the trail, deep in the jungle, head back, round through his throat. If you're a soldier wounded or killed in combat, you receive the nation's oldest medal, the Purple Heart. I misplaced mine years ago.

My buddy Ron Cook graduated from Madison High School. We knew each other after Vietnam, when being wild and drinking hard helped medicate our memories. A former Marine, Cook has asked me to join the local Military Order of the Purple Heart. This is the only national organization strictly composed of wounded combat veterans. There are 499 chapters and more than 43,000 members nationwide, and Cook belongs to Chapter 72 in Portland. Cook always wears some kind of purple shirt and black cap with the insignia of the Purple Heart and words stitched on it, like "Proud" and "Combat wounded." I never felt proud, because my biggest wound was in my head.

"It was cold that morning," Cook says of the day in Vietnam that he slung the radio over his shoulders, picked up his rifle and got ready to move out. He and Dick Warren and Bob Dilly were assigned to sweep the dirt road for mines, from the village to the highway. Cook had an M-16, Dilly carried a grenade launcher and Warren carried the minesweeper, which is sort of like a Weed Eater, only with a round, flat plate. Just as they reached the highway, they were ambushed by a dozen Viet Cong. In moments, Warren was dead. Two AK-47 rounds tore through Cook's side and another buried in his shoulder. He was knocked down and tried to fire, but his rifle jammed. Dilly kept launching rounds of explosions.

"They were coming for me," Cook says. "So I pulled a grenade. I was ready to roll on it and take a few with me." Suddenly, it ended. The firing stopped, and the Viet Cong disappeared.

Cook took me to one of the chapter meetings at the Disabled American Veterans bingo hall on Northeast Sandy Boulevard. There were flags displayed around the room and old soldiers -- wearing hats like Cook's -- sitting at lunch tables. A couple of vets were in wheelchairs, legs gone, and others had lost arms or been disfigured. Some wore their pain in faded eyes and the hollows of their faces, but all of them greeted me with a smile. I felt honored to be among such men, much like I do when I go to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. When I step off that elevator at the VA, I enter a different world, one packed with physically broken warriors, often tended by their weary wives. I feel humbled by their injuries.

Chapter 72 is a place for veterans to gather and support other veterans or organizations in need. It is composed primarily of Vietnam vets, but there are 40 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. There are also a few from Korea and WWII, including Walter Brophy, 92, who was a POW in Germany -- at Dachau -- and former Marine Gunnery Sgt. Gene Brandon, who has four Purple Hearts from Vietnam, the most in the chapter. Surprisingly, the commander of these old salts is 29-year-old Mike Robirds.

Robirds is strong and intense, like we all used to be. In June 2004 he was in the turret of his Humvee near Baghdad. Civilians were standing nearby or waiting in trucks, when a suicide bomber in a car exploded in front of him.

"Trucks were on fire; their drivers dead," according to a report in Stars and Stripes. One soldier said, "It was like the night of the living dead." Eleven men, women and children were slaughtered, and 32 were wounded. No soldiers died, but two were wounded. A steel plate Robirds had welded to the turret saved him. He was evacuated with ruptured eardrums and severe internal injuries. Today he is a successful businessman and the chapter's passionate leader.

The two places I've felt most comfortable outside my home and family is at the VA hospital or working with veterans in prison. The camaraderie comes from knowing that these men, too, are wounded. We understand each other, and we know about pain -- pain that runs deeper and lasts longer than a gunshot wound to the shoulder.

It's Veterans Day, and I love these Purple Heart soldiers. Even if my Heart was nothing special, I think I'll get a hat like Ron Cook's and spend more time in the company of my brothers.